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현재 위치

현재 위치

Tizen RT Long-term Goals

PUBLISHED 11 5월 2017

IoT JavaScript Framework

Tizen RT provides an application framework based on JavaScript. JavaScript is strong especially in IoT devices, since it has enormous developer community support and a fast development cycle. The application framework is built on top of the ultra-light JavaScript engine (JerryScript) and asynchronous I/O event processing library (libtuv), which enables fast application development and prototyping for individual IoT developers. IoT JavaScript Framework (IoT.js) will support ARTIK in the first quarter of 2017 and continue to open source activities to increase popularity of IoT.js.

In case of OCF, basic features based on TinyAra are initially supported.

S/W Updates

For home appliance products, Tizen RT supports the proprietary S/W update mechanism developed by Samsung. However, Tizen RT will become an open source project soon. This means that non-Samsung devices which run Tizen RT require the S/W update service as well. In order to support non-Samsung devices, Tizen RT plans to support OMA lightweight M2M (LWM2M)-based FOTA in 2017. ARTIK Cloud already supports LWM2M.

Fault Tolerance

IoT platforms are facing a challenge in the large-scale device management of deployed IoT devices. System reliability has become a key success factor for IoT platforms. If a critical bug in device drivers or other system components occurs, the whole system inevitably crashes in case of a traditional monolithic kernel. A clear solution is needed to overcome this challenge; however, typical Tizen RT target devices have only MPU (memory protection unit). Without MMU (memory management unit), protecting the system from faults is much more difficult. In order to provide MPU-based fault isolation, Tizen RT pursues 4 approaches:

Per-thread memory protection

Microkernel architecture

Self-healing

Live update

Assuming the completion of all these features, Tizen RT can be safely protected from any kind of faults. For example, even though a network component encounters a critical error, this fault can be identified by memory protection and isolated by the microkernel architecture. The network component can be restarted by self-healing without any effects to the entire system. If that component is not self-healed eventually, it can be updated by live update through the S/W update.

1 Memory Protection

Tizen RT supports not only flat build but also memory-protected build. The former can help to reduce the memory usage at the expense of memory vulnerability. The latter can be achieved at the cost of about 20~30% increase of memory usage. Which mode fits better for low-end IoT devices depends on the trade-off analysis while considering S/W requirements and H/W limitations.

User/kernel space separation is already achieved. The entire memory map is divided into user and kernel spaces. The kernel space is exclusively accessed by the kernel only. Any user tasks which illegally attempt to access this memory region raise an exception. In this mode, the kernel executes with privileged permissions while user threads execute with unprivileged restricted permissions, as shown in the following figure. Per-thread memory protection will be provided in the first half of 2017.

The user thread is executed in the user unprivileged mode with restricted permissions. When multiple threads are running, the scheduler preempts the current running task and brings the new ready-to-run thread for execution. The stack/data region of thread A is protected from being written by thread B even after thread A is preempted by thread B. This per-thread protection can be realized by MPU which stores and restores the MPU context of every thread at every context switch.

Figure: User and kernel separation

2 Microkernel Architecture

The microkernel aims at minimizing kernel functions by only including scheduling, task, memory, and IPC. Other kernel modules, such as device drivers, network stacks, and file system, must be isolated from the kernel as isolated components. This isolation has each system component execute as a separate user space thread/task. The kernel can communicate with the isolated components in the user space through IPC, as shown in the following figure. The frequency of IPC usage inevitably becomes higher than that of a monolithic architecture. This is why the IPC design to minimize its overhead is a key success factor of the microkernel architecture. The microkernel architecture will be designed in the first half of 2017 and the per-thread memory protection will be followed by the microkernel implementation.

Figure: Microkernel architecture

3 Self-healing

Recovering from failures makes a system sustainable. To this end, Tizen RT can detect faults regardless of where they happen, as depicted in the following figure:

A dedicated component called service manager monitors all system components through IPC and controls their execution.

After detection, a crash event is notified to the components (orange balloon) which have a dependency with the faulted component (pink crashed balloon).

The orange component immediately halts its dependent tasks and waits for messages from the service manager.

If the manager restarts the corrupted component and judges that the restarted component is operating normally, it informs the orange component of the successful restart of the corrupted component.

The orange component resumes the halted tasks and normally communicates with the restarted component through IPC.

The whole procedure is preceded by the microkernel architecture.

Figure: Self-healing

Configurability

Build configuration allows you to select the Tizen RT features at compilation time. Tizen RT can be configured from a full-featured platform to a small, connectivity-oriented platform.

The following table illustrates 3 full-featured configuration examples. Typical hardware requirements for wearable band and low-end home appliance configurations include Cortex-M4/R4, more than 256 KB RAM, more than 1 MB Flash, and Wi-Fi or NB-IoT/Cat-M. For a connectivity-oriented platform, such as a sensor device, the typical hardware requirements for the configuration include Cortex-M3, less than 256 KB RAM, less than 1 MB Flash, and IEEE 802.15.4 or BLE. This build-time configuration is based on Kconfig, which is the same as Kconfig in Linux. For GUI configuration, Tizen RT adopts menuconfig, which is also the same as menuconfig in Linux.

Table: Example Tizen RT configurations

Support for Standard IoT Protocols

While keeping the latest IoTivity version, Tizen RT supports other standardized IoT protocols, such as Thread and IPSP over BLE in 2017. These protocols can promote IoTivity across heterogeneous connectivity devices.

Support for Low-end Wearable Bands

The PoC of a lightweight UI framework has been developed in 2016 and is evolving into a commercial-level verified framework. This helps IoT manufacturers make their own low-end wearable bands with a small LCD.